We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Saturday, August 12. 2017

The simple answer to why barns are painted red is because red paint is cheap. The cheapest paint there is, in fact. But the reason it’s so cheap? Well, that’s the interesting part. Red ochre—Fe2O3—is a simple compound of iron and oxygen that absorbs yellow, green and blue light and appears red. It’s what makes red paint red.

Nope. Dairy barns were painted white -- with lead paint --to indicate purity. Barns are painted all colors, but most red ones were covered with red lead primer. Lead oxide, linseed oil, turpentine and Japan drier. Most outbuildings didn't merit paint, and red lead primer was the cheapest stuff you could buy. Cary Grant learned not to mix white lead primer with red lead primer in Operation Petticoat.

Lego abruptly removed its chief executive Bali Padda after just eight months on Thursday, replacing the 61-year-old Briton with a younger Danish industrialist in a battle to become the world's biggest toymaker.The Danish company said it had appointed Niels B. Christiansen, 51, who joins Lego after nine years as CEO of Danfoss where by focusing on digitalization he increased sales and turned the firm into a global leader in energy efficiency.

Consider your passion: The place of passion in doing whatever you want to do cannot be overemphasized. When you have a passion for whatever it is you are doing, it will push you when the going gets tough. There is no need sugar coating it and making it look like it would all go smoothly. There is nothing worth having that doesn’t face challenges. But when one is faced with challenges, the motivation is usually the passion they have. So you might want to consider something you have a passion for.

I was fired by Google this past Monday for a document that I wrote and circulated internally raising questions about cultural taboos and how they cloud our thinking about gender diversity at the company and in the wider tech sector.

Look at the picture. It's like these dweebs share one, big closet to go with their one, big opinion.

Nearly 50 years after the culmination of the first major race to the moon, in which the United States and the Soviet Union spent fantastic amounts of public money in a bid to land the first humans on the lunar surface, an intriguing new race to our nearest neighbor in space is unfolding—this one largely involving private capital and dramatically lower costs.

Listen, poindexters. We stopped going to the moon because there's nothing to do there. It was a stunt, to outdo the Soviet Union.

One Swedish journalist aboard the submarine who was reportedly put ashore before the boat ran into trouble has not yet been accounted for, according to Danish newspaper Berlingske. Bloomberg News reported that Madsen told a local TV station about the sinking, revealing that a problem with a ballast tank caused the crowdfunded vessel to sink.

Asked if Benchmark’s own investors might have the stomach to sue Benchmark, this person jokes that “every VC today could probably be sued by [their own institutional investors]” for their overly relaxed approached in dealing with startups. Either way, he believes that Benchmark’s lawsuit — which he calls a “misstep” — is “a completely obvious outcome of all this excess and absurdity of the recent years. It’s like when you’re a parent and you spoil your kid and he turns out not to be what you hoped. Are you going to love him or cut him off?”

This accurate description of recent investor/business relationships tells you all you need to know about the last 10 years.

That's what some Twitter users, including actor and former Barack Obama aide Kal Penn, are demanding, after President Trump tweeted Friday morning that U.S. “military solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.”

His motorcade doesn't obey the speed limit. They should revoke his driver's license, too.

Of course you still need a benchmark for floating-rate loans -- and for trillions of dollars of derivatives -- and it's not exactly clear what competing "transaction-based benchmarks" will win out. Nor is it clear how complicated it will be to transition all of those trillions of dollars of derivatives to the new benchmark. It would be easier if they'd just rebrand the new benchmark "Libor," and report it in the same places as the old Libor: Then contracts that refer to "Libor" could keep referring to "Libor." It would just be a different Libor.

The series, which begins on Sunday, takes as its jumping-off point the same book that was the basis for the 1995 movie starring John Travolta and Gene Hackman. But be advised that a title card here reads, “Based in part on the novel by Elmore Leonard,” and “in part” really ought to be highlighted somehow. This is a different story with different and reimagined characters; a point-by-point comparison of film and TV show, or TV show and novel, is even more irrelevant for “Get Shorty” than it usually is for such adaptations.

Get Shorty was a perfect movie. Get Shorty was a passable book. Get Shorty will be a terrible TV show.

Today’s fake-industry leader is Tesla, the electric car developed by subsidy entrepreneur Elon Musk, who also heads SolarCity and SpaceX, other government darlings. Musk’s genius is primarily in the subsidy-seeking realm — by 2015, U.S. governments alone had given his companies US$5 billion through direct grants, tax breaks, cut-rate loans, cashable environmental credits, tax credits and rebates to buyers of his products. Counting subsidies from Canada and Europe, the government bankroll could be double that.

This becomes a problem when the government changes hands, apparently.

Have a great Saturday, everyone! Maybe paint your barn red, and then paint the town red.

A nice day
Just home and perused Roger's Saturday links. He is so good at this. Too bad I can't afford to pay him more than he makes painting barns in Maine with red primer. Roger, I have done my share of red barn painting and entirely agree with the idea that

Trump's twitters have been ridiculed and praised. But the left seems most angry about them and wants him to stop. Hmmm! They want him to fail and yet they try to give him advice so he won't look so stupid. Why do I think the twitter is effective and that is the real reason they want him to stop. I'm not sure what a twitter is or how one tweets or even where to go to see tweets. Probably if the MSM didn't put his tweets on the TV I wouldn't know about them. But it is clear to me that the MSM and the left don't want Trump tweeting. So tweet on.

Google is a marketing company, not a search engine or a tech company. Marketing is all about knowing your customer and opinions and feelings have nothing to do with that, everything is analyzed and scrutinized and focus-group tested and test-marketed beyond belief. You don't just wing it, you don't say "hey, let's try this and see what happens, let's give it a shot." Even then, the majority of new products and new marketing programs fail somewhere along the line between conception and roll-out and unsuccessful products and marketing campaigns get yanked real quick.

Google's diversity program seems to be the exact opposite of this. They're just assuming that strict rules about diversity is going to result in a better product and there's no studying, no evidence to back this up, they're just winging it. Obviously, if strict diversity were a good thing, any company not practicing it would be at a competitive disadvantage and soon put out of business, which is pretty good evidence that strict diversity is not in fact a good business practice. (Same with the idea that women only make 78 cents to a man's dollar for the exact same work - if this were true industry would be dominated by firms with an all-female work force.)

Unless, of course, Google's not thinking in business terms of profitability and efficiency but has a much bigger agenda - they see a digital future of trans-national or supra-national corporations replacing national governments as the shapers and rulers of society and culture much the same as the USSR's New Soviet Man or China's Cultural Revolution. Then it starts making sense. Google's not pushing this diversity as good for *them*, they're pushing it because it's good for *you*. And they know better than you what's for your own good and they're willing to hurt you if you won't accept that fact. We know where this leads.

Much of this diversity nonsense is mandated by the federal government.

You should see what we have to go through in reporting "diversity" as a service provider for federally regulated financial institutions, thanks to Dodd-Frank (the requirements are the creation of eminent legislator Maxine Waters). We also now have the same nonsense for our healthcare clients, I assume because of Obamacare regulations. Where it gets interesting is when we are supposed to report on the number of our "gay, lesbian and transgendered" employees, when it is illegal under State employment law to inquire about such matters.

American Bricks. So that is what they were called. Had these as kids in the 60s. Only we had the white colored bricks. They were mainly used to build fortifications for our 1/76 & 1/72 scale plastic soldiers and vehicles.

I'd hope to claim them but they went in a garage sale one year.

Now that I know what they are called, I'll be searching for them for my grandsons.

My idea of comfort food is a fresh loaf of still warm crunchy French bread and a stick of room temperature Kerrygold unsalted butter. I can barely eat the whole thing but it's worth it. I don't know why the Kerrygold butter is better than American butter but it is. (Sounds like a tongue twister.) I usually try to butter a slice and eat it but can't quite get the right amount of butter that way and it melts and gets messy and doesn't taste quite as good melted. So I end up putting butter directly on the bread where I'm about to bite. It takes between a 1/4 and 1/2 lb of butter to finish the loaf. No idea how many calories or if it is good or bad for you but it is soooo good to eat.

I first went looking for their (Kerrygold) white cheddar cheese and was surprised to find it in many grocery stores. Why look in many you ask? Good question. Kerrygold is not cheap but the various stores have a significant difference in pricing. Anyway in the process I found Kerrygold butter and I love butter and when I lived in Europe I noticed the butter there tasted more buttery. So I tried it and I'm hooked. It is expensive but available almost everywhere.

There is something fishy in the Charlottesville event. The group protesting the removal of the Confederate statue had a permit to demonstrate. The city and the state tried to stop them but the court ordered it be allowed. The group protesting them had no permit but the city and the state allowed them to assemble in mass with clubs and other weapons. Then the police forced the permitted demonstrators out of the park and into the crowd of counter demonstrators. It appears to me that the state, the city and the police conspired to cause a riot where they fully expected the larger crowd of counter demonstrators to kick ass. That did in fact happen with numerous people injured. Then out of the blue the car ran down a number of demonstrators. Watching the video I did notice that the counter demonstrators were not simply local residents but they too were organized hate groups from out of town. (Workers World Party, ANSWER, International Action Center, Party of Socialism and Liberation, Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party front “Resist Fascism”, Marxist/fascist white and black extremists of “Antifa”, and various other anarchists.)

This entire event is being described as racists attacking peaceful freedom loving people but the facts seem to prove that it was a setup and the so-called freedom movement is a loose association of hate groups with communist backing and money. The fact that the government of Virginia and the city were conspiring with these hate groups to create this riot for political purposes is troubling. It is further evidence of this conspiracy that within minutes of the car ramming through the crowd the politicians on the left had prepared statements condemning Trump. I get the feeling we are being played by the left and the media... again.

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